Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science Sibling Disciplines with Diverse Cultures

Every program of study has an institutional context. This institutional context influences its content, its relationships with other programs, and the character of the graduates, among other things. A recent study of the curricula of the 19 software engineering program that were accredited in October 2009 indicated that more than half of these programs were housed in the same department as an accredited computer science program. It also indicated that there is a wide degree of variation in the degree of overlap in content of the software engineering curriculum and that of the computer science curriculum. At some institutions, there was as little as one course overlap between the two programs while at others there was a very large component that was shared. At some of these institutions, computer science and software engineering shared treatment of introductory material while others offered even introductory material to computer science students and software engineering students in different course sequences. This evidence suggests that there may be well be interesting dimensions of commonality and difference among curricula in a broader range of areas that were treated by the Computing Curricula 2005 documents. This paper extends the previous study to the consideration of interrelationships among the curricula of computing programs at a subset of institutions with accredited software engineering programs in October 2010. It considers the computing disciplines more broadly, including software engineering, computer science, and computer engineering programs, as these computing disciplines may be regarded as having stronger interrelationships due to greater commonality in technical topical content. The subset treated includes only those institutions in the United States with accredited software engineering programs at which there are also programs in the other two "major computing disciplines" and does not address the content of other computing disciplines such as information technology, information systems, or management information systems. There are thirteen such institutions. Of these institutions, the majority (eight) involve institutional contexts in which all of the responsible departments are in the same school or college. Within this set of eight institutions, some lodge all three of the disciplines (computer science, software engineering, and computer engineering) in the same department while others house them in different departments. At three of the institutions, computer science is lodged in a school that has no other engineering programs. The remaining two institutions either do not have an administrative structure equivalent to a school or a college or have separate colleges of computing and engineering. Interrelationships in at least three dimensions are discussed in this paper: relationships evidenced by administrative housing within the institution, relationships involving common sets of required courses, and relationships exposed by varying types and degrees of overlap among the programs. Those areas that are distinctive about a given program on a given campus will also be discussed, as they provide just as much insight into the relationships among the programs as areas of commonality do.